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Art teaches us to see into things. Folk art and kitsch allow us to see outward from within things.
Walter Benjamin
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Walter Benjamin
Age: 48 †
Born: 1892
Born: July 15
Died: 1940
Died: September 26
Art Critic
Essayist
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Philosopher
Sociologist
Translator
Writer
Berlin
Germany
Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin
Folk
Teaches
Folks
Allow
Teach
Within
Art
Kitsch
Things
Outward
More quotes by Walter Benjamin
Only he who can view his own past as an abortion sprung from compulsion and need can use it to full advantage in the present.
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To the lover the loved one always appears as solitary.
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There is no muse of philosophy, nor is there one of translation.
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Experience has taught me that the shallowest of communist platitudes contains more of a hierarchy of meaning than contemporary bourgeois profundity.
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The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.
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To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it the way it really was...It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.
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He who observes etiquette but objects to lying is like someone who dresses fashionably but wears no vest.
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I am unpacking my library. Yes I am. The books are not yet on the shelves, not yet touched by the mild boredom of order.
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The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.
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Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.
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Language has unmistakably made plain that memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theater. It is the medium of past experience, just as the earth is the medium in which dead cities lie buried.
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The art of the critic in a nutshell: to coin slogans without betraying ideas. The slogans of an inadequate criticism peddle ideas to fashion.
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Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method.
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True translation is transparent: it does not obscure the original, does not stand in its light, but rather allows pure language, as if strengthened by its own medium, to shine even more fully on the original.
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Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas.
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What we must demand from the photographer is the ability to put such a caption beneath his picture as will rescue it from the ravages of modishness and confer upon it a revolutionary use value.
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For every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter.
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A blind determination to save the prestige of personal existence, rather than, through an impartial disdain for its impotence and entanglement, at least to detach it from the background of universal delusion, is triumphing almost everywhere.
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The killing of a criminal can be moral-but never its legitimation.
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Books, too, begin like the week – with a day of rest in memory of their creation. The preface is their Sunday.
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